[ExI] A dispassionate examination of being an upload.

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 4:29 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/9/21 John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
>
snip

> You need not limit your happiness, only your path to happiness. If you
> enjoy smoking cigarettes but think it's bad for you you could modify
> yourself so that you no longer desire to smoke cigarettes even though
> you know you would like it if you did; after all, people manage to do
> this all the time today without benefit of direct access to their
> mind. Or, you could modify yourself so that you are disgusted at the
> thought of cigarettes and associate the cigarette-like pleasure with
> an activity that you find unpleasant but intrinsically worthwhile,
> such as exercising.

Or you could modify yourself so that smoking was not bad for you.  Or
you could modify yourself to get the internal state from smoking
without using tobacco.  Where this leads is scary.  Minsky talked
about the dangers of easy modifications to internal states in Society
of Mind decades ago.

Keith